AFTEREFFECTS: THE ADVISERS

AFTEREFFECTS: THE ADVISERS; Iraqi Exiles, Backed by U.S., Return to Reinvent a Country

This article was reported by Danny Hakim, Douglas Jehl and Michael Moss and written by Mr. Jehl.

Published: May 4, 2003

Correction Appended

ARLINGTON, Va., May 3—
Munther al-Fadhal believes that there is no place for religion in a new constitution for Iraq. He favors the establishment of relations between Iraq and Israel. He even thinks Iraq should outlaw the death penalty.

Such an agenda might not seem surprising in Washington or in Sweden, Dr. Fadhal's temporary home. But in Iraq, even after Saddam Hussein, and in much of the Arab world, it is very radical indeed, challenging deeply felt views about Islam, Israel and Arab autonomy.

And yet, this very weekend, aboard an American military plane, Dr. Fadhal is beginning a trip home to Iraq to try to put his ideas in place. As the designated senior adviser to the Iraqi Justice Ministry, he will be one of the leaders of a 150-strong team of exiles plucked by the Pentagon from posts in America and Europe to help shape the new Iraq.

A look at the team, assembled in a mere two months by Deputy Defense Secretary Paul D. Wolfowitz, shows how boldly the United States is trying to import secular, democratic notions to an Iraq whose political future remains the subject of profound division and flux. It also underscores some of the considerable risks involved.

''Maybe in five or six years they'll understand that this guy is a good guy,'' Dr. Fadhal said the other day over lunch near the Pentagon, referring to himself. More immediately, though, he said he expected that Iraqis who stayed behind through Mr. Hussein's rule would view him with hostility, not just as an import but ''as an agent or a spy.'' As a precaution, he said, he has arranged for six Kurdish bodyguards to meet him in Baghdad, to supplement his American military guards.

Pentagon officials have described the team of advisers, which works from United States-financed offices in Virginia and is called the Iraqi Reconstruction and Redevelopment Council, as primarily administrators whose job will be to smooth a transition to an Iraqi-led authority by resuscitating moribund ministries and restarting basic services.

''It's an enormously valuable asset to have people who share our values, understand what we're about as a country, and are in most cases citizens of this country, but who also speak the language, share the culture and know their way around Iraq,'' Mr. Wolfowitz said in a telephone interview. He said the Iraqi advisers would not play political roles. ''They are going to give us technical advice,'' he said.

But some Iraqi exile leaders say the creation of the team was too narrow and overly influenced by the views of Mr. Wolfowitz and fellow conservatives, who have espoused a vision of bold change in Iraq.

''This is insulting,'' said Imam Husham al-Husainy, an Iraqi Shiite leader who runs the Karbalaa Islamic Education Center in Detroit, which is aligned with the Supreme Council on Islamic Revolution in Iraq, a group that is based in Iran and has kept at arm's length from the American government-building effort.

''We don't follow others,'' Imam Husainy said in dismissing as ''yes men'' the members of the Pentagon-assembled team. ''Where is the democracy if you're just dictating our ideas? That's not democracy.''

Certainly most of the advisers espouse liberal, secular ideals that are at odds even with those of many other Iraqi exiles as well as powerful forces inside Iraq. The leader of the group is Emad Dhia, a 51-year-old engineer and pharmaceutical executive on leave from Pfizer in Ann Arbor, Mich. Among the other important advisers are Dr. Fadhal, a legal scholar and author of a draft Iraqi constitution, and Khidhir Hamza, a nuclear scientist who, with help from the Central Intelligence Agency in the 1990's, became one of Iraq's most prominent defectors.

The seeds for the exiles' team were planted at a reception that Mr. Wolfowitz attended in Washington last fall, Pentagon officials and the exiles say. There, Joanne Dickow, an Iraqi-American from Michigan who was an administration appointee at the Energy Department, discussed Iraqi-American and Arab-American views about the war with Mr. Wolfowitz. He asked if it would be useful to reach out to Iraqi-Americans.

After a flurry of meetings in the Detroit area between Iraqi exiles and Defense Department officials, the plans for the group were devised at a February meeting at the Pentagon and cemented after a rally in Dearborn, Mich., on Feb. 23 at which Mr. Wolfowitz was the leading attraction. The team was assembled over the next two months, in a round-the-world burst of telephone negotiations and voice-mail messages left by Mr. Dhia.

By the middle of this coming week, at least two dozen exiles will be installed in key temporary posts advising Jay Garner, the retired lieutenant general who has been the country's day-to-day administrator, and L. Paul Bremer, the retired State Department official who is expected to be appointed Iraq's senior American overseer. Some American officials openly hope that some of the Iraqis will stay on even longer to serve under the transitional government that Iraqi political leaders themselves are trying to assemble, under American and British supervision, with a target date now set for late this month or early June.

Correction: May 7, 2003, Wednesday A front-page article on Sunday about a Pentagon project to enlist exiles to help reshape Iraq referred imprecisely in some editions to official reticence. The Pentagon has been guarded in replying to inquiries about the project, citing security. But Deputy Defense Secretary Paul D. Wolfowitz made it public on Feb. 23; ''under close wraps'' did not signify complete silence. In some editions the article also misstated the scope of a conversation last fall between Mr. Wolfowitz and Joanne Dickow, an Iraqi-American at the Energy Department. She spoke with him about the views of Arab-Americans and agreed to help him meet Iraqi-Americans; she did not encourage him to reach out to them as part of a campaign to rally sentiment against Iraq's rulers.